Fire on the Mountain

by Terry Bisson

  “I know,” Yasmin said. “Actually, she and I had . . . a little talk last night.”

  Unlike Harper’s Ferry silently commotioned by the shadows of airships sliding overhead, Martinsburg wasn’t on the way to anywhere. The only things sliding over were clouds. It was a flat, bustling little city north of the Potomac, where the valley widened out so that the mountains weren’t visible on either side. Yasmin found it ugly. Socialism to the Mericans apparently meant that the new buildings should be all the same size, shape, and color, like soldiers in uniform; and in Martinsburg many of the buildings were new. In Nova Africa that phase had lasted only a few years, but now even those turn-of-the-century buildings seemed charming in their naive sameness.

  Maybe I’m just homesick, Yasmin thought. She was flooded with a sudden desire, almost frightening in its intensity, to see her little wood-frame ochre house on the canal in Charleston.

  They stopped to top off the battery, and Grissom phoned the old lady’s house. Yasmin noticed that people down here talked a little more like Grissom and a little less like her mother-in-law. The African-softened accent of the border was noticeably beginning to give way to the harsh Northern twang.

  But Laura May Hunter still lived on the border. The first thing Yasmin saw when the uniformed day nurse let her and Grissom into the little house was a tinted picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall.

  Lincoln was a Whig, backed by U.S. capital, who had organized a fifth column of Southern whites to support an invasion of Nova Africa in 1870, right after the Independence War. If the whites couldn’t keep the slaves, they at least wanted the land back. Though the invaders had been routed at the Battle of Shoat’s Bend without crossing the Cumberland River, ‘One nation indivisible’ had become a rallying cry for white nationalists on both sides of the border. The next five years, 1870-75, were as close to a civil war as Nova Africa was to see. When it began, the new nation south of the Tennessee River was 42 percent white; when it ended, it was 81 percent black. In the U.S., veterans and descendants of the ‘Exitus’ formed the racist backbone of the rightist movements for years: in the Bible Wars of the 1920s, the Homestead Rebellion, even the Second Revolutionary War of ‘48. In Nova Africa the whites who embraced (or made their peace with) socialism were called ‘comebacks’—even if they had never left—and Lincoln was no hero to them; but before his body had even been cut down in 1871, he had become a legend among the border whites in Kentucky, Virginia, and parts of Missouri.

  Apparently he still was.

  Yasmin pointed the picture out to Grissom, who nodded, then shrugged. “The Lost Cause,” he whispered.

  Following Grissom, who was following the nurse, Yasmin entered a dark parlor and sat in one of three floral-print chairs while the nurse went out with a wheelchair, one of three parked in a row in the corner. “She doesn’t have the same politics as her ancestor,” Grissom whispered. To say the least, Yasmin thought, beginning to wonder what was the purpose of this visit. The room was like a shrine to white supremacy. A painting showed Andrew Jackson strutting under a twenty-six-star flag across a field of dying Creek and Cherokee. On an end table several books sat upright between harp bookends: The Holy Bible; Palgrave’s Golden Treasury; Walker’s Sea to Shining Sea; Emerson’s Lament for a Lost America; Gone With the Wind; and one title that caught Yasmin’s eye, John Brown’s Body. She pulled it out far enough to see a lurid picture of a hanged man on the cover, then shoved it back just as the nurse wheeled her patient into the room. Above the lumpy sofa another Lincoln, this one a holo, stared down with big, mournful, calculating hound eyes.

  With the burning of the Charles Town courthouse, the waiting was over, or so it seemed. Everybody seemed relieved, especially the white folks. The war was on. Another plantation house was torched the week after Green Gables; and this one burned to the ground, the slaves not so foolishly putting it out but, Cricket speculated (acting this out), blowing on it. Another, two days after that. As the Shenandoah was not serious plantation country, this pretty much exhausted the opportunities. The slave market that was burned at Sandy Hook wasn’t really a market but a holding pen for ‘beaters’ heading up the Potomac from Washington and south along the Valley road, to the cotton and hemp country of the south and west, where slavery was big business. Meanwhile, the town was filling up with volunteers, adventurers, contractors, and newspapermen waiting to see what the government was going to do and how they could turn a dollar off it. All of them were white, all were men, all were armed, and all of them were full of strong talk. Around the kitchen and the stable, I heard their rumors, their boasts, their threats, and even (reading between the lines) their fears. None of these men was eager to go up the mountain after Brown. Not after Iron Bridge. They were all waiting on Holliday, the head of the Virginia militia, to arrive from the Tidewater. The private talk (for a stable and tavern boy heard lots of private talk) of Holliday’s agents, who were already in town arranging provender, was that these over-the-mountain fur-hat hillibillies didn’t really know how to deal with ‘niggers,’ as white folks felt free to call us in those days. The fur-hat hillbillies let them talk. Though the militia, press, government, and army alike, stayed at the Planters or the Potomac, those who weren’t ‘on found’ tended to eat lunch at least at Mama’s. It was cheaper and better. Everyday the big parlor was filled with a wild mix of white men, and the backyard, under the catalpa tree, with colored. Mama gave all the same fare: cornbread and beans, greens and hamhocks too fat for eating (a hamhock in those days, great-grandson, would flavor a week’s beans; they weren’t your skinny wartime hams), chicken, pork, squirrel and dove in season, rabbit and catfish, all the game and fish brought from her extensive network of slave and free black entrepreneurs. Mama had her partialities, though, and she would often give me a plate of pigeon breasts or sweet little squirrel hearts to set down near a certain favorite, always a preacher, and always colored. (We didn’t get white preachers whatsoever; I doubt Mama would consider them real preachers anyhow.) Mama was in her element, serving rough men strong food and making money: for though she was a slave, she managed all of the old German’s money. She liked a crowd as much as Deihl shunned society. Her warmth in this crowd was in contrast to her brooding silence in private. I found her, my own mother, proud, cold, shy, and mysterious; she seemed to come alive around others, but alone she was remote and distant. I regretted being an only child almost as much as I regretted slavery, though I knew the two were linked; Mama had told me that the reason she’d been sold to Deihl was because she could bear no children after me. I think now, looking back, that the lonely life of semi-freedom in town, in a white man’s house, killed something in her by taking her away from her people. But she had wanted it; she managed both our lives and was a slave in name only. Those were strange days, great-grandson. Two countries were fighting a war by night but eating out of the same pot of greens by day. In fact, the whites seemed positively friendly that August, thinking, I’m sure, that the ‘niggers’ who weren’t up the mountain liked both slavery and them. This particular one of their illusions didn’t survive the winter. The black folks, especially those in the town, seemed more mistrustful of one another than of the white folks in those first months of the war. Maybe it was the affair of Granny Lizbeth that did it. All the talk under the catalpa out back was of mules and weather and food, as if there were no such thing as the fire on the mountain, no army of abolitionists burning plantations and setting slaves free. I used to study those dark faces and wonder: did they really believe nothing had changed? Or was it part of the centuries-old mime the African played for the whites and, ultimately, for ourselves as well. We kids were going through our own changes. Since the raid, and especially since the night I lost Sees Her and found the flag (as I think of it), Cricket was more brotherly and less ornery than usual. He didn’t pick on me and boss me around like before. Meanwhile, the few friends I had had among the white kids in town, such as Sean Coyne, were gone. I didn’t see them anymore, not after Iron Bridge, not afte
r the courthouse for sure. And I didn’t miss them either, except for Sean. I later learned he was killed at Roanoke toward the end of the war; he died with me owing him two taws and a clay, which I would gladly put on his grave today, could I but find it. I was busier than a one-armed blacksmith, since I had to deal with the mules and horses (doubled in number) morning and night, and dinner from eleven to three. I got out of washing up, though, since Mama had hired two girls. War times are flush times in the livery business. Deihl was off almost every day in the Valley buying up horses and contracting for hay. I missed the old man around the stable. Except with Sees Her, or any troubled horse, he was a far better hand with horses than I, since he genuinely liked and understood the beasts, and I was always faking it, finding them the only living thing dumber than wood. With Sees Her gone, all I did was throw them hay and water. I never took time to rub them down or look at their hooves, though the militia and government men didn’t mind and seemed to care as little about their animals as I did. These were the first strange days, great-grandson, of the war we didn’t yet realize was a war.

  Then late one afternoon while I was watering the horses I heard a Tidewater voice say the word ‘war’ as if it had three syllables, and I froze as still as a deer. I was in full view of two men across the barn, but if you have ever been a twelve-year-old African in a white man’s country, you know what it is to be invisible. Just to make sure, though, I backed up between two horses and started rubbing them down, which would have alarmed any more intelligent animals, since I had never laid on them with a brush in my life. Under their bellies, far off under the hayloft, I could barely see two pairs of English-style boots facing each other, but barn sound is funny, and I could hear their voices as if I were standing next to them. They were planning an ambush that night out the Old Quarry Road, where they had intelligence that Brown’s men were coming down nightly for supplies. From the amount of tack and horses, I figured their force was about thirty men, as big as Brown’s whole army! When Deihl came back, they contracted for all our horses, leaving their own behind. I suppose one of the benefits of being in the government militia is that you subject a rented horse to fire and not your own. I was until almost dark getting the tack and mounts together; meanwhile I was burning inside. I had to tell someone. The only person I could trust, who would know what to do or who to tell, was Cricket; but he was three miles away at Green Gables, and it was already getting dark. I was still trying to decide what to do when Mama called me to help with the dinner spread. Something told me not to answer. It was dark by the time I got to Green Gables, out of breath all the way, and to my dismay Cricket was gone; running about everywhere, I checked down by the slough and out in the woods. There was no one else I trusted to tell. Cricket trusted the old granny woman, but I didn’t trust her or anyone. Cricket had said the fire two weeks before had cleared things up between those who poured water on the fire and those who ‘blowed on it,’ but this didn’t help me, since I didn’t know who had taken which side. Besides, things had changed. Nobody on the plantation seemed to want to talk to me, or I to them. I sneaked home on foot, heartsick, hating all the slaves; and surprisingly, got neither a scolding nor a whipping from my mother, who thought I was coming down with something and sent me to bed. I crept on up to my corner of the loft, and maybe I was sick: I went right to sleep. It was almost dawn when I was awakened by the sound of horses. They didn’t sound right. I peered out through the crack under the eave I had opened up for summer and saw a big bay eating Mama’s roses, his head not five feet from mine, nosing the roses, then gobbling them down. He was riderless, and his saddle had slipped down under his belly, and his back was smeared with blood. Two other horses came up, whickering into my little field of vision, one of them dragging one leg. I heard white men hollering far away. The back door slammed downstairs, and Deihl hopped into sight like a chicken, pulling on his filthy old pants, grabbing at the horses. It was like a scene from Hell. The ambush had been ambushed, and the horses had come home. Six men had been killed and twice as many wounded. The two Tidewater gentlemen rode in on one mount, one of them shot in the arm but not excited about it, I’ll grant him that: those Virginia slavers were cool customers to the end. I worked at cleaning up the horses while Deihl shot two. I always wondered why he spared me that, but not the gruesome work with the boys. It must have been hard on him. Through the day the news got worse and worse as the wounded came back. Worse for them, the whites, that is. I looked at black folks with a different eye by the evening of that long and bloody day, bloodier for Deihl since he lost four horses—two of which, ironically, the U.S. government still owes me for, since Mama was freed before she died and left her half to me. I was excited. It was clear that the raiders on the mountain had more friends—and more effective friends—than me. I delivered a plate of cornbread and side meat and beans to Mr. Pleasance up at the Planters Hotel that night, and instead of cuffing me, as he did when he was mean drunk, or giving me a nickel as when he was generous drunk, he had me set it outside the door. Then he slid a nickel under the crack. For me that nickel sliding was the true beginning of the war.

  Laura May Bewley Jenks Hunter was a tiny little woman like a china figurine: bone-white, covered with a web of fine wrinkles like crazing. She must be ninety, Yasmin thought, although she knew she was a poor judge: white people looked old to her at sixty. The old woman peered at her through huge glasses, then touched her hand. Satisfied that this visitor was real (as if perhaps she had plenty of the other kind) she settled back into her wheelchair and smiled. When she smiled, powder cracked from her face and fell into her lap like snow from a shaken tree.

  Yasmin told her how much she’d appreciated reading the letters. It would have seemed rude to have said ‘enjoyed.’

  Mrs. Hunter explained that her mother had been the sister of Dr. Hunter. All the letters had come from her, since Dr. Hunter had left no heirs. Yasmin had figured out that much; her question was, how had she gotten hold of the ‘Emily’ letters? Even though it had all taken place a hundred years ago, Yasmin was reluctant to ask. It seemed like prying.

  “My father was a Bewley, of the Lynchburg Bewleys, and my husband was a Jenks, you know, but when he died I changed my name back to Hunter. The Bewleys were nobody in particular, and the Jenkses were nobody at all. You know when you get old, dear,” the old woman said, “the past seems closer than the present.” Black folks called you ‘honey,’ and white folks called you ‘dear’: Yasmin had noticed that as a child, and it still was true. She herself had called Harriet ‘honey’ last night when she had told her she was going to have a baby brother. Brother? Had she really said ‘brother’? Did she really think that? Did her subconscious know some secret her body hadn’t yet revealed?

  “Now looky here.”

  The old woman was opening a little cedar box she held on her lap; she pulled out an ancient, browned tintype.

  “Here’s my mother, Laura Sue Hunter, as a girl with her brother, Thomas Hunter, who wrote the letters. He left no heirs, you know.”

  She handed the photo to Yasmin, who studied it, looking for some sign of the young man who had heard Douglass thundering at Bethel Church; whose best friend was a Jacobin; who was in love (did he even realize it?) with a Yankee bluestocking. But the picture was too posed and dim: a Southern belle standing next to a Virginia gentleman, both completely characterless, like holos of photos of drawings. She was a teenager made up to look like a woman; he was a boy in his twenties with an eager mustache, wearing a frock coat. They were standing in front of a photographer’s painted backdrop of a columned house, Spanish moss and cotton fields stretching off into the distance, in a scene totally unlike the Great Valley of Virginia where they had lived. Yasmin’s eyes were drawn back by the perspective, to the tiny stylized black dots bending down between the rows.

  “She married a Bewley, of the Lynchburg Bewleys, but she was a Hunter through and through,” the old woman said. “He, on the other hand—my uncle—he was what you might call the black shee
p of the family. Wouldn’t you call him the black sheep, Dr. Grissom?” She smiled, and another light avalanche of white powder fell into her lap.

  “Of course, blood is thicker than water, isn’t it, dear? You colored do hold to that, don’t you?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Yasmin sat up, startled, but Laura May Bewley Jenks Hunter went on as though hard of hearing:

  “Did you enjoy the letters? You can keep them a few more days.”

  The old woman’s fingers fluttering on the back of Yasmin’s hand felt like a bird’s claw. Yasmin let her pluck the picture back and put it into the box; then watched, curious, as she pulled one of the books from between the bookends.

  “I want you to read this, dear,” she said. “Just be sure and have Dr. Grissom return it with the letters.” She squinted, and powder whitened the back of Yasmin’s hand. “Which one is it?”

  “John Brown’s Body.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  September 11

  Miss Emily Pern

  112 Washington Square

  New York

  Dear Emily:

  Herewith, the names you requested for the Medical assistance campaign. Though I am happy for you that you are going to Medical school, I am sorrier than I can readily say to hear that you are going to England. Friends are rare in this life; a woman friend rarer still. Trusting neither the times nor the mails, I send this, because of the names, by hand with my comrade and confederate Levasseur, whom I commend to your trust absolutely. I hope things at home with your family are well. I am soon off on family business myself, to Baltimore, where I am to present my sister at Harvest Cotillion, my father being presently too ill to travel. I don’t look forward to the ceremony, although Laura Sue is a favorite, and makes one grieve for the young minds that are extinguished in finishing schools: another side of the human waste of slavery. I get regular reports from the South and can only say that people there are terrorized, and agitated, and bellicose, even with their closest relatives. I fear War. Will we meet again before you sail?